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In 2021, embalmers began reporting something they said they had not seen before: long, white, rubbery structures inside blood vessels.
The reports emerged shortly after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout began. Similar clots have since been reported in living patients and in the drain tubes of hospice patients, prompting a small group of scientists to investigate what they are, how they form and how common they are.
Medical commentator Dr. John Campbell recently interviewed two of those scientists — Dr. Daniel Santiago, a Florida pharmacologist, and Greg Harrison, an Australian organic chemist.
“This is not the ordinary clot story,” Santiago said.
Here are the top takeaways from their interviews.
How are these clots different from ordinary blood clots?
The white structures are long, pale and rubbery.
They have been referred to as “fibrous casts” because they are difficult to break apart, and some preserve the shape of the blood vessels where they formed.
Harrison said the clots can be stretched and can even support the weight of forceps. He described them as more like manufactured plastics or rubber “that the body has generated” than ordinary blood clots.
The structures also resist the body’s normal mechanisms for breaking down blood clots.
“This is nothing like normal blood clots either before death or after death,” Campbell said. “It’s a completely different thing.”
What are the clots made of?
The scientists found hundreds of different proteins in the structures, including large amounts of fibrinogen, a protein involved in normal blood clotting.
They also found evidence that some of the proteins have an unusual, misfolded shape, which they described as “amyloid-like.”
Amyloid is a type of abnormal protein buildup associated with several diseases, including Alzheimer’s. But Harrison stressed that the researchers are not saying they have definitively proven the structures contain amyloid.
“We’re being very careful here. And the report specifically says it’s amyloid-like,” he said.
The researchers said that distinction is crucial because they are describing what the proteins look like, not establishing exactly what they are or what role they play.
Santiago said abnormal changes to proteins can have important consequences because proteins perform many of the body’s essential functions.
“These proteins are the workhorses of the body, and if something happens to those proteins, that’s where we end up with a disease state,” he said.
The researchers also said the structures appear to form much more quickly than the amyloid buildup typically associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Harrison called this one of the most concerning aspects of the findings.
“This is the frightening part … [it] takes years to accumulate the level of plaque in the brain to manifest itself as Alzheimer’s,” he said. But the white clots are “occurring in volume.”
How large can they become?
Some of the structures are remarkably large. Campbell described casts that he said were large enough to completely block the aorta, the body’s largest artery.
“And if you block off your entire aorta, your legs will go black pretty quick. So to me, I thought they must be forming after death,” he said.
Harrison offered a different explanation. He said the structures may begin as much smaller clots or deposits that attach to damaged areas of blood vessels and gradually grow.
“Eventually they will totally occlude the vessel once they get to a certain size, but it may take years to actually get to the stage where it finally does that,” he said.
The researchers don’t yet know how quickly the structures grow, why some grow while others do not, or what determines where they form.
Campbell also raised another possibility: that many people could be developing smaller microclots that haven’t grown into the large structures seen by embalmers.
“That’s the scary part, and that’s why this has to be investigated,” Harrison said.
Are they new?
The researchers have found at least one historical precedent for unusual white, rubbery clots.
Harrison identified reports from 1988 to 1992 describing “white clot syndrome” associated with high-molecular-weight heparin, a drug used to prevent or treat blood clots.
Hospitals subsequently switched to low-molecular-weight heparin.
The researchers say they have not found other comparable documentation of the white, fibrous structures since then.
Santiago said the findings could represent “a new pathology that we’re looking at.”
Campbell went further: “Some people are trying to say that these have been seen for decades, but they haven’t. It’s new.”
The earlier reports make it inaccurate to say that structures like these have never been seen before. But the researchers say the structures now being reported are unusual enough — and potentially widespread enough — to warrant further investigation.
“Even if it disappeared tomorrow … we’ve had it now for what, five years? It still needs to be explained,” Campbell said.
How common are they?
One of the biggest gaps in the research is basic information about how common the structures are.
Campbell cited four annual self-reported surveys of embalmers conducted between 2022 and 2025. The surveys collected 808 responses from five countries.
Between 66% and 83% of responding embalmers reported finding the strange clots at least some of the time. The percentage of bodies in which embalmers reported seeing them ranged from 19% to 27%.
Those surveys do not establish how common the structures are in the general population, and the researchers acknowledge that reports vary considerably.
Harrison said some embalmers recently reported seeing the structures in as many as 80% of bodies, while others estimate they occur in 30% to 40%.
“Sadly, whether it’s declining or not, it’s still there in the concentration that we need to study it,” Harrison said.
What might be causing them?
The timing of the phenomenon has raised questions about COVID-19 vaccines and the virus itself.
The researchers do not claim to have established a link between COVID-19 shots and the white clots. Harrison specifically cautioned against blaming vaccines or the spike protein.
“We’re not pointing the bone at vaccines, and we’re certainly not pointing the bone at the spike protein per se. But what we are saying is it seems to be related to the virus itself,” he said. “We’ve got to be very careful on this because we want to stay within the science that we have.”
Harrison said evidence suggests COVID-19 infection itself may contribute to the formation of amyloid-like microclots. He pointed to findings showing that these abnormal, sticky microclots were found inside a living person who had previously been infected with COVID-19 but had not received a COVID-19 vaccine.
Campbell raised the possibility that vaccination and infection could have a combined effect.
“If I was thinking out loud, I could say it sounds like it could be a double whammy effect. Could be the combination of vaccine and natural infection,” he said.
There are still “pieces of the puzzle we don’t have,” Santiago said.
Why aren’t the clots being studied more closely?
Both Santiago and Harrison said they have struggled to obtain funding and scientific support for their work. They’ve paid for much of the research themselves and so far, scientific journals have declined to review or publish their findings.
“We did try to submit this to a pathology journal, and we got no response,” Santiago said.
Harrison said the researchers had to turn to what he called a “dare we say, slightly lower-tier journal to get the paper published.”
He also described an encounter with an embalmer who offered to provide samples but stopped responding when the researchers tried to arrange a meeting.
Campbell said he had heard reports of similar experiences, suggesting “some people seem to have been told to shut up.”
“It sounds like there’s some concerted opposition” to studying this, he said.
Campbell also questioned why more medical examiners aren’t investigating the structures.
“Why aren’t pathologists bouncing up and down all around the world?” he asked. “The silence is just deafening in the pathological community.”
The scientists want pathologists, universities and government agencies to independently collect and study the clots.
“It’s very simple stuff to start delving into the compositional nature of this material,” Harrison said. “If you follow it logically … you will come to the same conclusion we have. It’s inescapable.”
Campbell said government agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration, should be investigating the structures.
“This is a complete international disgrace that this isn’t being done,” he said.
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Why does it matter?
Santiago said his investigation into the clots began shortly after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, when patients and others started reporting unusual health problems that he’d never encountered.
He said researchers should not dismiss people’s experiences because of political arguments over vaccines.
“We can’t discount what people are experiencing,” Santiago said. “You’ve heard these stories … on X, you’ve seen them on Facebook. … It’s happening.”
He also warned against allowing the phenomenon to become accepted simply because it has persisted.
“I don’t want this, over time, to be seen as something normal,” he said.
The researchers’ bottom line is simple: There are enough reports of these unusual structures to justify finding out exactly what they are and why they are appearing. “It’s something that needs to be addressed,” Santiago said.
Watch Campbell’s interview here:
Related articles in The Defender
- FDA Says ‘No Safety Signals’ Linking White Blood Clots to COVID Shots, Despite Embalmer Survey Suggesting Otherwise
- Exclusive: 70% of Embalmers Report Finding Strange Blood Clots Beginning in Mid-2021
- ‘Gravely Concerning’: Spike Protein Found in Female Stroke Victims Up to 17 Months After Receiving mRNA COVID Vaccine
- ‘Definite Causal Link’ Between COVID Vaccine Rollouts and Peaks in All-Cause Mortality, New Study Finds
- ‘Tacit Admission of Guilt’: Two Top Journal Editors Decline to Testify Before Congress on Scientific Censorship
